


Under the Table

by Barkour



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Drinking, M/M, Missing Scene, Romantic Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-27 05:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2681414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian really shouldn't doubt the Bull.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under the Table

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for, uh, side romance? All right.

The table rattled, and Dorian sighed into his mug. Bull held the back of his hand to his mouth for a long moment, and then it came: a belch from the deeps. The unbearable tension in his shoulders eased.

“That’s four for me,” Bull said. He gestured to the bartender.

“I’m impressed,” said Dorian. “You covered your mouth that time.”

Bull folded his arms upon the table and leaned heavily into that circle. “Thought I heard Viv—Ma’am—the missus earlier.”

“Well, don’t call her that to her face. She’ll pull your eyes out with the nails of her little fingers.”

“Like being a kid again,” said Bull wistfully.

Dorian drained his mug and, holding the last of the ale in his mouth while he tried to work up the resolve to swallow, he too gestured to the bartender. At last he shoved it down.

“Four for me as well.”

“Three for you,” Bull said, “and four for me.”

“Four for me as well,” Dorian said again with an edge.

Bull’s eye had slid shut. His chin rested on his arm. With the first finger of his right hand he tapped at the air.

“Four for me. And three for you. You’re slowing down, pretty boy.”

Dorian puffed. “Oh, like hell I am. And you’re getting far too comfortable. Shots, please, my good man!” he shouted at the bartender, who threw his hands out as though to say why are you still here?

Bull cracked his eye open. A glimmer of interest showed. 

“Shots of what? None of your artsy brews.”

“I believe in supporting local craftsmen,” said Dorian, “and Garderasan whiskey! My good man!”

“You already called him that.”

“Ten shots, each! Line them up in an orderly row so that my companion can find his. You can find them if they’re lined up, can’t you?”

“Oooh, I’m a companion now,” said Bull. He grinned, a lazy thing that pulled his mouth high to the left and creased the furrowed corner of his eye. “Better watch it, Dorian. I might start to think you… _like_ me.”

Dorian scowled. “Don’t flatter yourself. And don’t smile, either.”

“You’re the one flattering me,” Bull said mildly. “It’s all right. I understand. I know I can be hard to resist. But hate sex, that’s not really my thing. Unless it’s your thing. I’m open to suggestions.”

Dorian laid his hands on the table and leaned in toward Bull. Bull’s scarred brow shot high, and the smile turned startled. For a single, measured moment Dorian stared at and into Bull’s face: long, oddly narrow, grey as stone and weathered with black stubble. Then he nodded.

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk.”

Dorian eased back into his seat. “Usually you at least try to be subtle.”

“Take that back,” said Bull. “Never on my ass have I tried to be subtle.”

The bartender set two trays on the table, one before Bull and the other before Dorian. “It’s late,” he said.

“Here he is!” said Bull, straightening from his arms. “My friend. My friend,” he said to the bartender, though the sharpness of his smile was entirely for Dorian, “please fetch another of your robust ales for this man.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Dorian loudly. “Thank you.”

The bartender rolled his eyes and left, muttering something about the wife and child he hadn’t seen in days. That was hardly Dorian’s fault; it certainly wasn’t Bull’s fault, either. They’d only been in the bar for one, two hours. Perhaps three. He counted on his fingers. The ales were not the first drinks they’d chased.

“You have to catch up,” Bull said, watching Dorian’s fingers. “Or are you afraid I might beat you?”

Dorian curled his fingers to his palm. The rings stacked on his third finger caught the light, and two red sparks glanced off them in passing. 

“If you’re going to beat me,” Dorian said, chancing a look, “you’re going to pay for that ale.”

He’d startled Bull again. Bull sat back heavily in his chair and considered Dorian. His eye lidded, and his lower lip turned out. The inside of it was slick, gleaming wetly and at odds with the harsh bristles of his beard. 

A profound horror gripped Dorian’s chest. He’d a vague intention of religious reformation; then like cheaply marinated chicken it passed through him.

“Knew it,” said Bull.

“You did not.”

“Knew you fancied me.”

“None of those words are even remotely true,” said Dorian.

“It’s okay,” Bull assured him. “You’re not the first to want to ride—”

“Don’t you think of finishing that—”

“The Bull.” His eye creased yet again. His eye was often creasing when he spoke with Dorian.

The ale arrived, a mug each. “Please leave,” said the bartender. 

Dorian snatched the tankard and downed the ale rather than be forced to think of something so witty it would shut Bull up for good. Finally it was done. Dorian slammed the mug to the table and gasped for breath. Without any shame at all Bull was staring at Dorian’s throat.

“I’m beginning to think there’s nothing that can stop you,” Dorian said. He dragged his hand over his mouth. His mustache was wet. Dourly he flicked his fingers. 

He had thought Bull would move his staring to Dorian’s mouth, but instead he looked up to find the Iron Bull was studying Dorian’s eyes. Dorian wrinkled his brow.

“What?”

“Tell me ‘no,’” said Bull.

Dorian blinked. He felt the movement of his eyelids but not his eyelashes, never as long as he would have liked them. The Bull went on watching; he was waiting. 

A curious thing. Dorian had not been a boy for several years. The uncertainties and wants and gripping hurts of those first few, frightened loves and lusts were well behind him, a series of tightly wound impulses he could look at clinically and then put away. As people went they did not feel. Wanting—that sort of wanting that made the heart ache and the head sick—was uncouth. He was beyond this.

His stomach had compressed. Dorian turned his head and covered his mouth and, unable to stop it, burped long and from the gut.

“Let it out,” said Bull. 

Dorian fussed his lips together and glared. “First to finish all ten shots wins four crowns.”

Bull toyed with a shot glass, rubbing his finger along its side. “You sure you can do this?”

“Only if you can afford it,” Dorian fired. “You’re paying for my ale, remember? Drink!”

They blazed through their rows. Perhaps Bull was a master of the dive, friend to all beers and most ales, but Dorian had years of experience with the unique searing experience of Garderasan whiskey. Two at a time he knocked the shots back: cupped his tongue to channel the whiskey swiftly down his throat, as Bull swore and pinched at his nose.

“Nine and ten,” said Dorian hoarsely. He set the glasses bottoms up beside their fellows.

Bull was shaking bodily, with a hand to his nose and the other a fist on the table.

“Six,” said Dorian, “that’s impressive. Unused to the finer spirits?”

Bull flipped Dorian a complicated hand gesture that he translated to mean something rude involving Bull’s horns, or something else entirely. The whiskey had scoured Dorian’s throat. Aiming for swaggering bravado, he picked up his tankard only to remember he’d emptied it.

“Here,” Bull rasped. He slid his tankard to Dorian, who took it gratefully then, out of empathy for the suffering of all men, offered it to Bull.

“What the hell was that?” Bull said when he’d finished drowning the ale.

“Whiskey,” said Dorian with a careless wave of his hand. He was sweltering under his shirt and vest. “A rite of passage at the academy.”

Bull eyed him. “You’re tougher than I thought you were.”

“And you’re softer than I thought you were,” said Dorian, striving to appear as though he weren’t sweating tremendously. “Four crowns, as agreed.”

Bull made a show of patting his hips then, beneath the table, his thighs and calves. Being a man of character, resolve, and widely acknowledged taste, Dorian kept his eyes trained somewhere respectable, like the powerful, muscular hollow of Bull’s very thick throat.

“Must have left my wallet in my other pair of trousers,” said Bull with every semblance of earnest apology.

“You only have one pair of trousers.”

“I have three,” said Bull. “Not everyone needs four wardrobes.”

“I have three,” said Dorian dryly.

“A civilized number.”

“Oh, yes, very civilized. Unlike a barbarian I’ve come to know.”

“That’s kind of rude,” said Bull. He was smiling again, the jagged scar tissue along his mouth rumpling. “Blackwall’s a decent guy.”

“More shots!” Dorian yelled to the bartender. 

“How much can you drink?” Bull weighed Dorian, a slow process that had Bull lingering a time on Dorian’s bared shoulder, his naked biceps. “You’re, what… A hundred seventy?”

“A gentleman does not discuss his fighting weight outside of a salon,” said Dorian, “and you’re the one who couldn’t finish his shots. Just five for my large friend!” he shouted to the bar.

“You’re sweating through your shirt,” Bull advised. “And, ah…” He gestured with a little claw to his own breast, specifically the underside.

“And you’re about to fall out of your chair,” said Dorian. “Who are you to judge my… When you’re running around bare to the wind?”

“I wear trousers. We went over this.”

“Shirts! I’m talking about shirts,” Dorian said, thumping the flat of his hand on the table. “I’m talking particularly about your unwillingness to support the local textile industry.”

Bull shrugged his massive shoulders. His chest, very thick, swelled. 

“You have your clothes tailored. So you know how expensive that would be. I’m, ah…” He gestured again with his claws. “A big guy.”

“Showing off,” Dorian muttered. “Surely you could find a tent somewhere to go along with your clown trousers.”

“They’re the only ones that fit,” said Bull.

“Showing off!” said Dorian. “Is this something your people do?”

“My people?” Bull echoed.

“Run around half-naked.”

“Don’t your people flog each other in the streets?” Bull asked. 

It was, of course, rhetorical, but Dorian could hardly resist. 

“Only on Wednesdays,” he said as though to a heathen.

Bull laughed. “So. Wednesdays for us, too. To be as one with the natural progression day. That what you guys call it too?”

“We just call it Wednesday,” Dorian said. “No need to make such a show of it.”

“’Cause if there’s one thing you are,” Bull said, “it’s repressed.”

“At least my nipples are where they’re supposed to be,” said Dorian with all the scorn of a true actor, as the bartender returned, tray in hand. 

He set the tray down. He turned. He left. Dorian cleared his throat and organized the shot glasses, empty traded for freshly filled. Bull leaned toward him. The breadth and twist of his horns cast a long and distorted shadow across the table and Dorian’s hands.

Bull crooked his brow. “You were saying about my nipples?”

Careful not to spill so much as a single scorching drop, Dorian set the last of the shots before Bull. Then he gave up entirely. 

“They’re too low.”

“My nipples?”

Dorian made to cup his own chest. “On your breasts.”

“On my bosoms,” said Bull.

“They’re supposed to be up here.” 

Dorian, then, who leaned across the table. He flicked his finger against Bull’s continental left breast, at the place where he would have expected to find an areola. Bull’s skin was surprisingly smooth, tough, yes, but smooth. He’d the heft of a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, on top of thicker muscle. 

Very easy, in the fleeting second that his fingertip was on Bull, to imagine the appeal of this weight upon you. Easier still to imagine running his palm along Bull’s chest up to his shoulder if only to savor the rasp of his own callused hand over that expanse. To touch and be touched. Dorian withdrew.

Bull blinked. There was something horribly knowing about it. An old patience. Likewise in Dorian arose an old thing, too, that unkind voice—not his father’s but his own—that said here’s another mistake you’ll have to take with you. 

So many stupid impulses. Play at love but don’t ask for it. Well, it would only be play. That was all Bull wanted, clearly. That was all Dorian wanted. He could live with another mistake. And if you fuck a Qunari man, said Dorian to Dorian, how much of that is for your father?

His fingers itched. Dorian reached for two shots and downed them. No more the expert. He choked. Bull pushed the mug to him, and Dorian waved him off. 

A breath to cool, a breath to steady. He mastered it. Dorian lowered his hand from his throat. One of the glasses had tipped. He set it right. Between thumb and finger, he cradled it and then he left it.

“I already owe you four crowns,” said Bull.

Dorian lifted his eyes. He was not at his best. Shirt mussed, hair too. Mustache out of sorts, likely sticky with that blasted high north ale Bull insisted he try. 

Broaden your horizons, the Bull had suggested. Give something new a try.

For once, Dorian thought, his father could kindly fuck right off. Teen rebellion had nothing whatsoever to do with the slow-moving curve of Bull’s wide mouth. Nor had it much to do with the memory of Bull’s laugh as he’d answered Dorian’s joking admiration that Bull had so contained himself at the Winter Palace in kind. 

“Well,” said Dorian lightly, “I’m sure you can think of some way to make it up to me.”

“I’m sure I can think of something, too,” said Bull.

He had an idea of the sorts of things Bull might suggest. Bound and leashed indeed. I am very drunk, Dorian thought; but that wasn’t at all true. It would be simpler if it were true. He pretended it was so. More mistakes. Dorian had never been particularly good at sex with friends, of the happily non-committal sort, but then he was hardly friends with the Bull, was he? 

“You could start,” Dorian said, each word warm in his mouth, and Bull gravitating across the table to him, shoulders and horns and the width of his smile all closing the distance, “by settling my tab tomorrow.”

Bull winched his mouth to the side, skeptical. “That’s more than four crowns.”

“We could do another run of shots if you’d like,” Dorian said. He breezed his hand through the air. “We have them right here before us. I’ve even given you a handicap.”

“I don’t need a handicap,” said Bull, unperturbed. 

“Broaden your horizons,” Dorian murmured, letting his lips linger, open. “Try new things. Shockingly sound advice from a dubious source, I know.”

“You’re coming around,” Bull said. Then his teeth flashed, his smile lean, the warmth of his gaze paltry before the sudden, heating grip of that awful grin. “You could be coming.”

“Somebody,” said Dorian, “must gag you. For your own sake.”

“Is that an invitation?”

Oh, just the once, thought Dorian. What would it matter? He could screw this wretched hungering out of his bones, and the Bull would move on to another string of mutually satisfying one-offs, and Dorian could be free of the whole thing and able to put all his attention to things that mattered. How would it work anyway, Qunari and Tevinter; nothing to come of it but the end of it. That was enough, he supposed.

“If it must be,” said Dorian in reply. 

Bull watched him. His arm unfurled. Gently he reached across the table to stroke his blunted claws down the naked slope of Dorian’s shoulder. His knuckles were coarse. 

“Tell me ‘no,’” said Bull, “and that’ll be it. I won’t bother you again.”

Dorian scoffed. “Oh, I sincerely doubt that.”

“You shouldn’t,” said Bull softly.

He took his hand away. Dorian’s skin prickled in the absence.

“Well, then,” said Dorian. “How could I resist such temptation? Yes, I suppose.”

It was that damned smile of Bull’s; that was the problem. If he never smiled again at Dorian like that, as if he were terribly fond of Dorian and thought him, of all things, _sweet_ , then it would all be so much simpler.

Regrettably, the sex was wondrous.

**Author's Note:**

> The nipple joke is the fault of: Ariella; Peep. What a couple of perverts.
> 
> Also, how are Dorian and Iron Bull not dead after drinking all that? The bartender's watering down the drinks. So rude.


End file.
